What an Immigration Raid Looks Like

Eighteen years ago, ICE raided a factory in Massachusetts. It was devastating for hundreds of workers, and it didn’t go well for the owner either.

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights:

• In the latest 21 Hats Podcast episode, Liz Picarazzi talks about how she’s prepared for the coming tariffs.

• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says tariffs could stifle growth at the worst possible time.

• In Los Angeles, a wave of restaurant closings is expected.

• The Wall Street Journal says Biden’s green shoots are starting to pop in red states.

HUMAN RESOURCES

An immigration raid 18 years ago in Massachusetts offers a glimpse of what’s to come: “For weeks after Ricardo Gómez Garcia was arrested at his textile job in the largest workplace raid in modern Massachusetts history, his autistic 4-year-old son would scour the family’s apartment trying to find him. Mauricio Gutierrez had delighted in his outings with his father — to the park or to pick up treats before dinner. Where had he gone? The boy could not sleep. He refused to eat, his mother, Dominga Gutierrez Toj, recalled. ‘He would just look, and search,’ Gutierrez Toj, 54, said in Spanish on a recent evening at her New Bedford apartment. She tried to reassure Mauricio that everything would be OK. But it would not be OK, for her small family and hundreds of others in New Bedford whose lives were fractured forever after that late winter morning almost 18 years ago, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swarmed the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory and arrested 361 undocumented immigrants.”

• “The New Bedford raid stunned workers inside the Bianco factory. On a Tuesday morning, as they started their shifts at their sewing stations, a voice on the company’s intercom suddenly ordered: Don’t run. Immigration officers are in the building, the Globe reported at the time. Some ran anyway, as agents stormed in; others hid in the basement. The air filled with screaming and crying. The workers, many of them Indigenous Mayans from Guatemala who had come to the United States to escape persecution back home, had been making vests, backpacks, and other equipment for the U.S. military at the height of the Iraq War.”

• “Workers who were arrested, many of whom spoke a Mayan language called K’iche’, tried to call lawyers or family members, desperate to have their children picked up from school or from babysitters. Many were first taken to a former army base in Massachusetts and subsequently, more than 200 were sent to facilities in Texas and other states, advocates said.”

• “The owner of the Michael Bianco factory, Francesco Insolia, ultimately pleaded guilty to harboring and concealing undocumented immigrants and was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock in 2009 to 12 months in federal prison. New ownership took over the factory in late 2007, and then, about two years later, shut it down and moved operations to Puerto Rico.” READ MORE